It is one of those days when a single story dominates the news agenda - the death of Libya's ruler, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

And it is therefore fascinating to see how the national newspapers' front pages - the choice of picture, headline and overall presentation - reflect their own agendas.

Most editors chose big images of a badly injured and bloodied Gaddafi moments before his death, though the Daily Express and Daily Star - counter-intuitive as usual - used only small pictures.

The Independent (and its sister, i) tried that most difficult of tricks by running four video grabs to illustrate the drama of Gaddafi being dragged from a truck. Headline: "End of a tyrant."

The Daily Telegraph and The Sun selected the same picture of Gaddafi on top of the truck. But the headlines were very different. The former chose "No mercy for a merciless tyrant" while the latter preferred the more personalised and vengeful "That's for Lockerbie."

As so often with Sun headlines down the years, you get the impression that, in three words, it has expressed the feelings of the majority of its readers.

There was an interesting contrast between The Times and the Daily Mail. Though they selected the same picture, the Mail cropped out the face of Gaddafi's militiaman captor.

The Times's fuller image ("A tyrant meets his end") did capture the sense of confusion and chaos, but the Mail's crop made for a much more dramatic poster-style cover.

Headlined "Don't shoot!", the only other words were a large caption: "Battered and bloody, the tyrant of Libya pleads for his life. Moments later, he was dead - executed with a bullet to the head."

The Daily Mirror was somewhat similar ("Don't shoot! Don't shoot!") but it was the only paper to carry the picture of a bare-chested, bloody Gaddafi after death.

It told the story in a strapline: "For 42 years Colonel Gaddafi terrorised his own people..and the world. Yesterday, he died as he lived, shown no mercy as he pleaded for his life.."

The Guardian's sober headline "Death of a dictator" preferred to let a big picture of Gaddafi being manhandled on to a truck to convey the drama of his final moments.

By contrast, Metro carried a relatively small picture and a large white-on-black headline: "A mad dog in life but a cowering rat in his last, brutal moments."

So what did the papers' editorials have to say? What does Gaddafi's end signal for Libya's future?

The Independent echoes that concern about an armed population. "The most immediate priority must be to disarm the militias roaming the country," it says. "Significant numbers of exhilarated freedom fighters must be persuaded to give up their weapons and return to civilian life."

But the Mail is worried about the toppling of Gaddafi carrying "no guarantee of stability for Libya. Introducing democracy to a country with no democratic traditions or institutions is notoriously hard."

For The Sun, David Cameron emerges with respect. It says: "The removal of Gaddafi will always be to his credit, just as the courting of Gaddafi by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair will be to their shame."